kompot.”—“That’s fine.” Bursts of conversation reached us from the other tables. There were also some junior officers from the Wehrmacht and a few civilians. Turek was watching us, then I saw him talking animatedly with Pfeiffer. Some Gypsy children were running between the tables. One of them came up to us: “Khleb, khleb,” he chanted, holding out a hand black with filth. The mountain man had brought us some slices of bread and I held one out to the boy, which he immediately crammed into his mouth. Then he pointed to the forest: “Sestra, sestra, dyev. Krasivaya.” He made an obscene gesture. Voss exploded in laughter and flung some words at him that made him run away. He headed toward the SS officers and repeated his gestures. “You think they’ll follow him?” Voss asked.—“Not in front of everyone,” I said. Turek in fact gave the boy a clout that sent him rolling onto the grass. I saw him make as if to take out his gun; the kid bolted into the trees. The native, who was officiating behind a long metal box on legs, came back to us with two skewers that he laid on top of the bread; then he brought us the drinks and glasses. The vodka went wonderfully well with the meat dripping with juice, and we each drank several measures, washing it all down with kompot, a juice of marinated berries. The sun was shining on the grass, the slender pines, the monument, with the slope of the Mashuk behind it all; the clouds had completely disappeared on the other side of the mountain. I thought again about Lermontov dying on the grass a few steps away, his chest shattered, for an empty remark about Martynov’s clothes. Unlike his hero Pechorin, Lermontov had fired into the air; his adversary, not. What could Martynov have been thinking as he looked at his enemy’s corpse? He himself had wanted to be a poet, and he had certainly read A Hero of Our Time; so he could savor the bitter echoes and slow ripples of the growing legend, he knew too that his name would remain only as that of Lermontov’s murderer, another d’Anthès encumbering Russian letters. But he must have had other ambitions when he started out in life; he too must have wanted to create, and create good things. Perhaps he was simply jealous of Lermontov’s talent? Or perhaps he chose to be remembered for the harm he had done, rather than not at all? I tried to remember his portrait but already couldn’t manage to. And Lermontov? His last thought, when he had emptied his pistol into the air and saw that Martynov was aiming at him, had it been bitter, desperate, furious, ironic? Or had he simply shrugged his shoulders and looked at the sunlight on the pine trees? As with Pushkin, they said that his death had been a setup, a contrived assassination; if that was the case, he had gone to it with his eyes wide open, obligingly, demonstrating his dissimilarity from Pechorin. What Blok wrote about Pushkin was no doubt even truer for him: It wasn’t Dantes’s bullet that killed him, it was the lack of air. I too lacked air, but the sun and the shashliks, and Voss’s joyous kindness, helped me breathe for an instant. We settled our bill with the native using occupation carbovanets and started again toward the Mashuk. “I suggest we go to the old cemetery,” Voss said. “There’s a stele there where Lermontov was buried.” After the duel, his friends had laid the poet to rest here; one year later, a hundred years before our arrival in Pyatigorsk, his maternal grandmother had come for his remains and had brought them home with her, to bury them next to his mother, near Penza. I readily agreed to this suggestion of Voss’s. Two cars passed us in a whirl of dust: the officers of the Kommando returning. Turek was driving the first vehicle himself; his hateful look, which I glimpsed through the window, made him look truly Jewish. The little convoy continued straight on but we went to the left, following a long zigzagging path that climbed up the side of the Mashuk. With the meal, the vodka, and the sun, I felt heavy; then the hiccups started and I left the path for the woods. “Are you all right?” Voss asked when I returned. I made a vague gesture and lit a cigarette. “It’s nothing. The tail end of something I caught in the Ukraine. It comes back from time to time.”—“You should see a doctor.”—“Maybe. Dr. Hohenegg must be coming back soon, I’ll see.” Voss waited for me to finish my cigarette, then followed close behind me. I was warm and I took off my cap and jacket. At the top of the knoll, the path formed a wide loop from which there was a fine view over the city and the plain beyond. “If you continue straight on, you return to the sanatoriums,” Voss said. “For the cemetery, we can go by these orchards.” The steep slope, with its faded grass, was planted with fruit trees; a tethered mule was nuzzling the ground in search of fallen apples. We descended the hill, sliding a little, then cut through a wood that was dense enough for us soon to lose the path. I put my jacket back on as the branches and brambles were scratching my arms. Finally, following Voss, I emerged onto a little muddy hollow that ran alongside a cemented stone wall. “This must be it,” said Voss. “We’ll go around.” Since the cars had passed us we hadn’t seen anyone, and I felt as if I were walking in the open countryside; but a few steps farther on a young boy, his feet bare, leading a donkey, passed us without a word. Following the wall, we finally arrived at a little square, in front of an Orthodox church. An old woman dressed in black, sitting on a crate, was selling some flowers; others were coming out of the church. Beyond the gate, the graves lay scattered under tall trees that plunged the sloping cemetery into shadow. We followed a rising path paved with coarse stones buried in the ground, between old graves lost in dry grass, ferns, and thorn bushes. Patches of light fell in places between the trees and in these islands of sun, little black-and-white butterflies were dancing around faded flowers. Then the path curved and the trees opened out a little to reveal the plain to the southwest. In an enclosure, two little trees had been planted to give shade to the stele that marks the place of Lermontov’s first grave. The only sounds were the chirping of crickets and the breeze rustling the leaves. Near the stele were the graves of Lermontov’s relations, the Shan-Gireis. I turned around: in the distance, the long green balki furrowed the plain to the first rocky foothills. The mounds of the volcanoes looked like clumps of earth fallen from the sky; in the distance, I could make out the snowy peaks of the Elbruz. I sat down on the steps leading to the stele, while Voss went to nose about a little farther on, thinking again about Lermontov: like all poets, first they kill him, then they venerate him.